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Autonomous Long Range Navigation for
Planetary Rovers

A planetary rover that has to achieve long range
navigation cannot rely, in general, on permanent and immediate
communications with a control station. The lack of knowledge about the
environment and the robot's situation within the environment (unlike
Sojourner which was observed by the Pathfinder lander), precludes
direct teleoperation of robot motions. Therefore, the robot has to be
endowed with a large degree of autonomy for achieving navigation. The
capacity of planning and executing motions on various kinds of terrain
is then essential and relies strongly on the ability to build adequate
environment representations.
The approach we have developed is primarly based on the adaptation of the
perception and motion actions to the environment and the situation of the
robot. The navigation task involves several levels of reasoning, several
environment representations, and several action modalities. Additionally, the
robot is endowed with a reasoning system for selecting sub-goals, navigation
modes, and perception actions, according to the situation.
We have performed experiments testing this approach to autonomous navigation
with the mobile robot ADAM in a planetary-like environment. This work is
continuing with two other robots, EVE and LAMA.

Biographical Sketch
Raja Chatila received his Ph.D. in control science from the University of
Toulouse in 1981. He spent one year at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence
Laboratory in 1982 as a post-doctoral scholar. Since 1983, he has been a
research scientist at the Robotics and Artificial Intelligence Group of
LAAS-CNRS Toulouse, France, where he performs research on mobile robotics,
architectures for planning and control, and perception and environment
representation. He leads projects on intervention robots and planetary rovers.

For appointments, please contact the host, Tony Stenz, at axs@frc.ri.cmu.edu